Newest Content

| | 0 Comments

Who's the Boss: Player Choice, NPC Consent, and the Designer's Unseen Hand

Last week, we discussed the spectrum of allowance - a way to describe how allowed a given action is within a game, ranging from impossible to required. A key point is that the game’s designer places each action on the spectrum. Aside from bugs (which violate the designer’s intent) and hacks (which partially override the original design with another), in a game you can only do what the designer lets you. This is true even when you have freedom of choice - that freedom was granted by the designer.

Some games understand this well and play with it effectively - see for example The Stanley Parable, especially the confusion ending (warning: spoilers). But not all games that examine player choice understand the designer’s role.

The Journey Of Me is a free browser game. It’s a 2D platformer and it takes about fifteen minutes to play. I am now going to spoil the hell out of it, but honestly I don’t think you should be too worried about spoilers in this case.

The Journey of Me title screen

Read more...

0 Comments
| | 0 Comments

Capsule Review: Depression Quest

A short Twine game in which you play as a character living with depression and experience a series of vignettes which apparently take place over several months. After reading through a scene you are given a list of options and choose how to respond to the situation. Your choices affect your mental state and your mental state affects your choices - some options are displayed but unselectable if you aren’t in a condition to act on them.

Read more...

0 Comments
| | 0 Comments

Capsule Review: Until Dawn

An interactive horror movie starring a group of teens who think it’s a great idea to return to a remote mountain cabin on the anniversary of the night an ill-advised prank led to two of their friends disappearing and presumably dying in the nearby woods. What could go wrong? The player controls each teen in turn through conversation, exploration, and action sequences.

Read more...

0 Comments
| | 0 Comments

That Which Is Not Forbidden: The Spectrum of Allowance

When Grand Theft Auto III came out, it introduced a new interaction to the series: players could now solicit prostitutes and then kill them to get their money back.

“To engage with prostitutes in the game, all the player had to do was pull up to certain scantily clad women, who would enter the vehicle in exchange for a sum of money. . . . Disturbingly, players found they could reclaim their cash by simply killing the prostitute with their car after she’d exited."
—Samantha Leichtamer, The 5 Most Shocking Grand Theft Auto Moments

This capability persisted in later games in the series and gave rise to a lot of discussion. Much of the commentary was careful to point out that murdering prostitutes is not required at any point. But of course Grand Theft Auto games are exactly that: games. You don’t have to play them at all. And they’re known as games where a lot of the fun comes from messing around in the sandbox, going on murder sprees that are also thoroughly unrequired. So is there a meaningful distinction to be made here?

I think there is. Merely pointing out that you can do something in a game is incomplete. It treats it as a binary, with the action either allowed or disallowed. But game design is much more subtle than that. There’s a wide range of how allowed an action can be.

Read more...

0 Comments
| | 0 Comments

Capsule Review: Sonic Runners Adventure

A level-based auto-runner starring Sonic and friends. Tap to jump, double-jump, and triple-jump/fly/forward-smash depending who you’re playing as. Collect rings, defeat enemies, and avoid obstacles while your character races forward to the end of the level. To pass the level, you must complete at least one of its three goals, which are generally about collecting a certain number of rings or defeating a certain number of enemies, sometimes as a specific character.

Read more...

0 Comments
| | 0 Comments

Capsule Review: Miitomo

Nintendo’s first mobile app, Miitomo is more social toy than game. It has a few modes - customizing your Mii, providing answers to various open-ended questions (ranging from “What are you doing this weekend?” to “What’s something you’ve lost that you’ve never been able to find?” and everything beyond and in between) which your friends can view and comment on, creating “Miifotos” by posing Miis, speech balloons, and other items against whatever background image you like, and getting new clothing and accessories for your Mii either via in-app currency or the Pachinko-like “Miitomo Drop” minigame.

Read more...

0 Comments